2 years ago
In recent years, major publishers and their conservative imprints have grown increasingly skittish over conservative firebrands. Simon & Schuster dropped provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017 after controversial comments surfaced, and last year dropped Missouri Senator Josh Hawley for his support of the January 6 insurrection, stating that they could not “support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”
As larger publishers have stepped away from such authors, newer ventures are stepping up to fill that void — including Post Hill Press, a Tennessee-based independent publisher founded in 2013, and its new conservative imprint, Bombardier Books. Bombardier was founded in 2019 by Adam Bellow, who left stints editing conservative imprints at HarperCollins and St. Martins in order, as he put it at the time, “to play a role in rediscovering what it means to be conservative at a time when ideological priorities are changing and political identities are in flux.”
So what does it mean to be conservative today? If Bombardier’s catalog is any indication, it would seem to be an increasingly extreme and unapologetic attitude. When Laura Loomer — a former candidate who ran in, and lost, former President Donald Trump’s Florida congressional district on a platform of Islamaphobia and was banned from social media — brought out her memoir, it was with Bombardier. When Scott Atlas, the largely discredited doctor who advised Trump’s Covid response from August to November 2020, sought to put out his side of the story, he did it through Bombardier. Controversial Congressman Matt Gaetz’s memoir, Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution? Bombardier. More and more, Bombardier’s stock-in-trade is in the kinds of writers who are too controversial to be worth the headache for more established presses. As Bellow told the New York Times in April of 2021, “The reaction of people on the right to the cancellation of political books is to double down, so we have lots of books to publish.”
As the title of the imprint suggests, these books are meant to be explosive; and Bombardier seems at first blush poised to become a clearinghouse for the right’s most radical ideas. The publisher, which did not respond to a list of questions about its sales figures, fact-checking process and whether it considers any authors too controversial, seemed as good a place as any to divine where the future of the conservative movement might be heading. So over the course of a few months, I read through 10 titles of Bombardier, including Robert Spencer’s Confessions of an Islamophobe and Benjamin Weingarten’s American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party. I also read a robust number of contrarian takes on the Covid-19 pandemic, from people like Scott Atlas (A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America), The Federalist contributor David Marcus (Charade: The Covid Lies that Crushed a Nation), as well as I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture by Simone Gold, a doctor who was an early and persistent champion for hydroxychloroquine, which has not been proven to work against Covid.
And I was deeply underwhelmed.
Again and again, what struck me while reading these books was how conservative they are — not in a political sense, but in the word’s more fundamental meaning. For an imprint whose logo is a stealth bomber, there’s very little stealthy about this enterprise, nor are these, in any rhetorical sense, real bombs being thrown. As some parts of the conservative movement and Republican party become more focused on the culture wars and attacking their liberal counterparts, Bombardier suggests this might be the end-point of those trend lines: a lot of posturing and bombast, and very little in the way of new ideas or even new approaches to old ones.
From the start, I was shocked by the quality. Unlike conservative imprints at major publishers like Broadside, or more established independent rightwing presses like Regnery, Bombardier’s titles display an almost open contempt for their readers. Gold’s book lacked any printing on the spine itself. Attorney Alan Dershowitz’s Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy, turns out, despite its title, to be a copy-paste assemblage of all manner of previously published op-eds, including Dershowitz’s musings on President Barack Obama’s Israel policy, the 2016 Democratic primary and other things that have nothing to do whatsoever with Trump or the book’s stated topic. The nicest thing I can say about the production of these books is that they appear to be spell-checked.
As for the ideas contained in these books, Spencer’s Confessions of an Islamophobe seems to be par for much of the course. Beyond its incendiary title, the book’s stated positions don’t veer too far from the standard rightwing talking points regarding Islam: It’s bad and dangerous, intolerant and violent, and poses a threat to Christians, Jews and women everywhere. These arguments are odious, to be sure, and they are often hypocritical. Spencer devotes a whole chapter, for example, attacking Islam as a homophobic religion, while of course remaining silent on American rightwing evangelicals’ attitudes on the LGBTQI community.
But what’s most salient about this attack on Islam is not its hypocrisy but how tired it is. The Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was the first to articulate it from the right in 2002. From Dutch politician Geert Wilders to French politician Marine le Pen to Trump, the attack has been used so regularly it’s an old classic by now. Spencer’s treatment brings nothing new to it — not even additional vitriol or hate. The same goes for the rest of his arguments; Confessions of an Islamophobe reads, at best, like a greatest hits piece.
Spencer’s only move is to embrace the label he’s long been given. “I am an Islamophobe,” he states at the book’s opening. “It’s true. I’ve denied it for years. But now I admit it.” Rather than make a new or convincing argument for his beliefs, the book’s primary goal is to attempt to destigmatize the term itself. This move is standard for how these books operate: take a position the right has focused on for years, albeit one where they’ve relied on euphemism and dog-whistle, and drop the pretense, trying to reclaim the critique.
Gaetz’s book, similarly, is in many ways an attempt to turn the most sordid aspects of political life into virtues. “Speaker of the House Paul Ryan once knocked me for going on TV too much,” he says in Firebrand’s opening pages, adding that it’s “impossible to get canceled if you’re on every channel … And if you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.” The best these books have to offer, it seems at times, is nothing beyond ham-handed attempts to normalize abhorrent but already widespread attitudes.
In lieu of new ideas, what do such books offer their readers? Primarily, a rehash of current events. Nearly every book I surveyed — from Loomered to I Do Not Consent to A Plague Upon Our House — was focused primarily on offering a blow-by-blow of the Trump years from the writer’s specific perspective. Gaetz’s Firebrand has very little to offer by way of an ideology or a legislative agenda, but it fills this absence with name-dropping and gossip from Mar-A-Lago (the absolute horniness of Firebrand, with its depictions of making out in hot tubs in the presence of the Secret Service and condoms setting off metal detectors, would be revolting enough even if Gaetz was not under investigation for under-age sex trafficking). Marcus’ Charade offers a slanted re-telling of the past few years, with the overarching goal of convincing his reader that the initial Covid-19 lockdown of spring 2020 “must never happen again.”
This need to almost compulsively revisit and re-narrativize the past few years is not just repetitious or useless, though. What's being done here is a very specific kind of work. As the country has been plunged into chaos and uncertainty in the past few years, we’ve seen how, on any given day, some new or shocking revelation might be enough to up-end anyone’s prior beliefs or convictions. The Covid-19 pandemic in particular has scrambled a number of rightwing talking points: vaccines are bad, for example, but Trump deserves credit for developing them so quickly. Retelling the events of the past two years is vital, then, in controlling the storyline: The chaos of the past has to be ordered and explained in an ideologically consistent manner.
Thus Atlas’ insistence that we all completely misunderstood the basic science of Covid-19 from the very beginning. “The more I studied the data and the literature,” he writes of his experience at the dawn of the outbreak, “the more obvious it became that basic biology and simple logic were missing from the discussion. Instead, fear had seemingly displaced critical thinking about the data already at hand.” Atlas’ contention that fears of the virus were overblown read as ludicrous in the wake of more than 900,000 deaths in this country alone, but the goal here is not to accurately describe reality. Rather, the goal is to offer a narrative that bridges — as best as is possible — the observable reality around us and the reader’s pre-established beliefs.
It’s in this sense that Bombardier’s books are most explicitly “conservative”: not in their ideology, per se, but in their attempts to conserve a movement. In recent years, the basic meaning of conservatism has been scrambled as Trump, an anti-free-trade, anti-intervention president seized the mantle of the Republican party. Then, the pandemic added a new anti-vax and anti-mask element to conservatism, usually at odds with the prevailing medical consensus.
One feels in these pages an active fight against a splintering of a movement, a reassurance that everything you saw and experienced confirms your prior convictions. These books are not here to throw bombs so much as they are to dispel doubt. Reading through Bombardier’s catalog, it’s hard not to think of Orwell’s line from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” These are books that hope to control the future by obsessing on the recent past, attempting to make sense of everything that’s just happened in the hope of husbanding the fire of an ideologically confused movement.
The other theme that runs through these books, appearing again and again, is a fixation on “Big Tech.” Loomer’s book is the most obvious; it opens with the night she learned she was permanently banned from Twitter, and continues in that vein unabated for the rest of the book. A psychological portrait of someone addicted to social media, Loomer’s book alternates between blaming social media companies for making their platforms so addictive, and railing against them for banning her, until she resembles a junkie whose dealer has cut her off. “These companies scientifically manipulate their products to be alluring to us,” she writes at one point, “and then for dementedly trivial or blatantly partisan reasons, they take them away forever with no recourse or appeal possible.”
But this same theme appears in nearly every other book I read, in some form or another. Gold, watching her own misinformation scraped off of Youtube and other platforms, proclaims that we are “quite possibly watching free speech in its death throes,” going as far as to say that “Big Media and Big Tech have manipulated the social reality of America and Americans.” Gaetz likewise frets about how the right “tried to be polite conservatives for the past few decades, like quiet, well-behaved children in a church pew. But the big tech companies — Youtube, Facebook, Twitter (which shadowbanned and ‘labeled’ me)— have removed or demonetized our channels.”
Again, these accusations of censorship are nothing new, and seem especially odd when coming from people like Gaetz who are simultaneously demanding “Critical Race Theory” be banned from America’s classrooms. But this obsession with “Big Tech censorship” answers a more pressing question: Why are these figures writing books in the first place? As they’ve been banned from Twitter and Facebook, some of these writers have attempted to migrate to sites like Gettr, Gab, and Parler, but this is not a long-term solution. Their goal is not to linger in the cesspits of racist trolls and anti-vax gurus, but to get their voices heard in mainstream discourse. Publishers like Bombardier, which has a distribution deal with Simon & Schuster, may be the last hope for far-right figures to have a say in the public square — getting them table space at Barnes and Noble even as Twitter grows tired of them. Book publishing, in 2022, has become an alternative to social media for those who've worn out their welcome there.
Reading so many books that pretend to be shocking while serving up reheated talking points gives one a grudging respect for the older generation of rightwing media trolls like Ann Coulter. Coulter never had any new or interesting ideas either, but her rhetorical moves accomplished what they set out to do. By working a relentless mockery and derision toward the left, coupled with an air of splendid definitiveness about the rightness of her ideas, Coulter was effectively able to ridicule her political opponents while reassuring her readers that they were morally and culturally superior
Reading Bombardier’s pouters, who default to a sense of wounded grievance, it’s easy to see why Coulter’s schtick worked so well and for so long. But now, it seems, Coulter’s “Can you believe the Left is this stupid?” has transformed into Loomer’s “Can you believe the Left did this to me?” Even as she tries occasionally to make a case for someone other than herself, she can never quite get away from her own solipsism. “I am confident that by the end of this book, I’ll have persuaded you that it’s a big deal that companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple have a power of veto over your social and professional life,” she writes, and then immediately adds: “And you might have a better understanding of why it has been so damaging to my life — and why I’m still recovering.”
This perpetually wounded air of grievance makes for rough reading when it’s repeated for 200 pages. It's a posture that indicates a decadent and exhausted end of a movement's fire and ideology, a spent force consuming itself with self-pity and recriminations.
It may be too early to know whether or not this attitude will pay off. Public sales figures of Bombardier books aren’t public, but sales of Gaetz’s Firebrand have been fairly underwhelming, per his congressional financial disclosure, suggesting that he’s only sold a few thousand copies of the book.
But Bombardier may already be learning that pushing the edges of acceptable discourse while remaining palatable to the mainstream is a tough balance to maintain. Last year, it was announced that Post Hill (the publisher of which Bombardier is an imprint) was going to publish a memoir by Jonathan Mattingly — the police officer involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor — until their distributor Simon & Schuster faced such a backlash that they refused to distribute it, leading Mattingly to ultimately part ways with Post Hill. But there’s always a new upstart ready to publish the figures too controversial for the mainstream; the book found a home with a new imprint, DW books, published by news site The Daily Wire.
This story has been updated to correct David Marcus' role at The Federalist.
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